The Stupidest Thing Ever Said

The Quote: "Suicide is a life-threatening event."

The Speaker: George Philip, director of research and product development, Singulair, Merck & Co.

The Context: FDA and Merck have received some reports that users of the asthma and allergy therapy Singulair have committed, attempted, or seriously contemplated suicide.

I need not belabor why Mr. Philip's statement immediately rises to the head of an extremely crowded class. I will, however, take a few sentences of my and your life speculating on why it was uttered. I'll also do a little virtual impotent fist-shaking. That should be fun for the whole family.

Used as either a noun or a verb, "suicide" has a single, ugly meaning. Intentionally misusing the word to mean "attempting or thinking about taking one's life" robs "suicide" of its ugliness. And the usage can't have been unintentional. By the commutative principle, pretending that the completion of the act is the same as its attempt, Singulair doesn't cause a person to die after slashing his or her wrists.

The truth is, the drug may or may not cause big enough changes in users' body chemistry to play a factor in driving people to act on the inkling that suicide is a better option than gasping through to what is a predetermined conclusion anyway. I strongly suspect that the relationship is coincidental and, therefore, spurious -- mostly because a large number of Singulair users are very sick when they first start taking the drug.

What is really the issue for me is how easily a person was able to gut a word of its essential meaning. This is nothing new, of course, but it should always be decried.

Words, to coin a phrase, mean stuff. Exact meanings may change over time, but "suicide" can never and will never mean "attempted suicide." To act like it does is worse than being a proponent of Newspeak. It makes one Humpty Dumpty.

Who wants to be that guy?

A Turn for the Turn

Album: Steve Earle and the Dukes, The Hard Way, 1990

Best Track: "Regular Guy"

Lasting Memory: For reasons I don't even know, I have an extremely vivid memory of driving through the frigid predawn of Blacksburg, Va., during the winter of 1996 while listening to "Billy Austin," which is the last song on side 1 of The Hard Way. The recollection isn't unpleasant, but it is freighted for several reasons.

First, listening to the song itself, which runs

My name is Billy Austin
I'm Twenty-Nine years old
I was born in Oklahoma
Quarter Cherokee I'm told

Don't remember Oklahoma
Been so long since I left home
Seems like I've always been in prison
Like I've always been alone

Didn't mean to hurt nobody
Never thought I'd cross that line
I held up a filling station
Like I'd done a hundred times

The kid done like I told him
He lay face down on the floor
Guess I'll never know what made me
Turn and walk back through that door

The shot rang out like thunder
My ears rang like a bell
No one came runnin'
So I called the cops myself

Took their time to get there
And I guess I could'a run
I knew I should be feeling something
But I never shed tear one

I didn't even make the papers
'Cause I only killed one man
But my trial was over quickly
And then the long hard wait began

Court-appointed lawyer
Couldn't look me in the eye
He just stood up and closed his briefcase
When they sentenced me to die

Now my waitin's over
As the final hour drags by
I ain't about to tell you
That I don't deserve to die

But there's twenty-seven men here
Mostly black, brown and poor
Most of 'em are guilty
Who are you to say for sure?

So when the preacher comes to get me
And they shave off all my hair
Could you take that long walk with me
Knowing hell is waitin' there

Could you pull that switch yourself sir
With a sure and steady hand
Could you still tell youself
That you're better than I am

My name is Billy Austin
I'm twenty-nine years old
I was born in Oklahoma
Quarter Cherokee I'm told

is just about the worst way to start a day. I was on my way to my graduate assistant sinecure, though, which is a great way to spend a day. I could only be bummed by the true story of young Mr. Austin. I could never hope to truly understand the man's reality.

Second, as events unfolded, the song set the sloping-towards-annoying-and-irrelevant stage for the long second act of Steve Earle's career.

Third, "Billy Austin" nicely states a lot of my problems with the death penalty, illustrating how the sentence is unfairly meted and unsatisfying. But it is also a tough listen. The medium absolutely kills the message. This is a huge problem for most message songs.

"Billy Austin," in short, was and is a triple Mr. Yuk sticker -- unrelatable, offputting, and damn-near unlistenable.

I'm not sure why Earle decided to start filling his life and his albums with death obsession and heavy-handed message, but I suspect his ridiculously over-the-top heorin and cocaine adictions bear some of the blame. I mean, I'm all for inebriation followed by sobriety and all against capital punishment, but I seriously wish Earle had erred on the side of dependency rather than advocacy.

He should have heeded the words of his own "Regular Guy":

I'm just a regular guy
Never get rich, but I always get by
I got me a wife and a couple a kids
I done pretty much like my daddy did

He always did the best that he could
Took care of mama and us pretty good
He never got rich but he never did try
He was just a regular guy

Well the world goes around
I can't stop it
So I'll sit back and watch the sun go down
If it comes back up then this day's a good 'un
You know I wouldn't be that surprised

I'm just a regular guy
And I'll work until the day that I die
I'm too young to quit too old to hire
These days a man can't afford to retire

Didn't vote for nobody last time
Cause they wasn't worth a trickle down dime
But one man's promise is another man's lie
And I'm just a regular guy

If he had taken that message to heart, then he could have kept rocking and stopped talking. But instead of cranking out songs like Hard Way's "Promise You Anything " when he got out of court-ordered rehab, he churned out multiple variations of "Esmerelda's Hollywood." And I'm not entirely sure what to think of either of those particular songs, because Earle cowrote both with Maria McKee but sang one of these dirty love in the afternoon anthems with his sister Stacey (see the above sticker).

The worst thing I can charge Earle with, though, is that he made me an apostate to my own musical tastes inasmuch as I own five of his clean and sober CDs and enjoy listening to them from time to time. I guess I just can't quit Earle.

Up Next: Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars, 1998

Note from Management: I'm cutting the Acquired section because it didn't seem to add much. I'll mention the provenance of albums when it's relevant or interesting, but not as a matter of course. Of course.

Never Post Today

What you can post next week.

I'll have a new post up tomorrow. I promise. It will be good, too. I imagine.

The Cost of One's Soul

Has to be higher than this

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I received this e-mail yesterday from an American-Romanian outfit, and gmail helpfully flagged it as spam.

I'd be lying if I wrote that I wouldn't like to make some coin from this deiversion, but the chances of this inquiry being legitimate is too low to make the solicitation worth considering.

Also, if the "ad agency" had actually read any of my posts, they would know that I do not offer the best forum for discussions of things that are going just fine. I just couldn't live with myself if I got less poor by betraying my generally gloomy vision of mankind.

Maybe these guys should contact me. Take special note of the Oxfam link at the top righthand corner of The Apocolypse Times site. Apparently, just because it's the end times doesn't mean that we can't help some of the folks bearing the brunt of the attack of the Four Horsemen.

Beetlebaum Wins the Human Race

Album: Steve Earle, Copperhead Road, 1988

Acquired: I got this for Christmas in 1988. Santa bought it at a Music Man on December 2 of that year. Just as well that the album was purchased. I've heard Santa's rythm section just can't handle the time changes like they used to.

Best Track: "Johnny Come Lately"

Lasting Memory: It seemed like every time I returned to Virginia Tech between 1990 and 1997, I would hear "Copperhead Road" blasting from my car's radio on WROV , "The Rock of Virginia," which broadcast from Roanoke. Even though the song is rockin', it is without a doubt a country song, even a bluegrass or Irish folk song. The station had "Copperhead Road" in regular rotation, though, because the song tells the lived history of millions of Appalachians.

Here're the video and the lyrics for the song:

Well my name's John Lee Pettimore
Same as my daddy and his daddy before
You hardly ever saw Grandaddy down here
He only came to town about twice a year
He'd buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine
Now the revenue man wanted Grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It's before my time but I've been told
He never came back from Copperhead Road

Now Daddy ran the whiskey in a big block Dodge
Bought it at an auction at the Mason's Lodge
Johnson County Sheriff painted on the side
Just shot a coat of primer then he looked inside
Well him and my uncle tore that engine down
I still remember that rumblin' sound
Well the sheriff came around in the middle of the night
Heard mama cryin', knew something wasn't right
He was headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load
You could smell the whiskey burnin' down Copperhead Road

I volunteered for the Army on my birthday
They draft the white trash first, 'round here anyway
I done two tours of duty in Vietnam
And I came home with a brand new plan
I take the seed from Colombia and Mexico
I plant it up the holler down Copperhead Road
Well the D.E.A.'s got a chopper in the air
I wake up screaming like I'm back over there
I learned a thing or two from ol' Charlie don't you know
You better stay away from Copperhead Road

Identity music, like identity politics, plays well but almost never solves anything. (See what I did there with linking to WROV's link to vdeo of Obama's race and politics speech? Damn, I'm good.)

Earle fully embraces his redneck (née Scotch-Irish) heritage on the first side of Copperhead Road. I've never read now-Sen. Jim Webb's history of the Scotch-Irish in America, Born Fighting, but Earle could be a case study in that tome. Born in Fort Monroe, Va., into a family with Kentucky roots that had settled in Texas and scattered West and East during the Depression and World War II, Earle went back to Texas as a teen and took up a guitar in his effort to beat the world, instead of the handgun so many of the character's in his songs choose, like in Copperhead Road's "Devil's Right Hand."

And Earle went all the way back to the source for his music and his worldview on this album, recording "Johnny Come Lately" with The Pogues. (Couldn't find a Steve Earle version that was full and free.)

The problem for the rednecks in Earle's songs, and in the real world, is that the identity and the lifestyle it perpetuates -- self-defeating doubt about one's actual worth ("Snake Oil"), self-defeating drinking ("Back to the Wall"), and a tendency to cling desperately to the first and seemingly only means of salvation (all of the love songs on the second side of Copperhead Road but especially "Waiting on You")--offer little in the way of comfort, success, or even hope.

In this week of St. Patirck's Day, Obama's excellent speech, and Easter, which is the single most definitional day on the Western calendar (in or out you Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and contemplatives! In. Or. Out.), it was good to relisten to Copperhead Road and give all of this a thinking through.

The conclusion I came to this morning is that when it comes to the struggle of between the races, Spike Jones and the City Slickers got it more right than anybody else all the way back in the 1940s. Beetlebaum wins.

Up Next: Steve Earle and the Dukes, The Hard Way, 1990

P.S. If I was of English or Scottish descent, I'd be more than a little upset that the world ignored St. George's Day or St. Andrew's Day. Those are, respectively, April 23 and November 30, if you're include to begin a couple of new drinking traditions. And if you do take up St. George's Day, you can get to be (pick one) Catalonian, English, Georgian, Serbian, Herzegovinian, Macedonian, or Bulgarian for a day. The dragonslayer is the patron saint of all those regions and countries.

Not Entirely Angry or Young, But Surely a Man

Album: Seteve Earle & the Dukes, Exit 0, 1987

Acquired: This album found me. I had never heard anything by or about Steve Earle when I found Exit 0 in the cutout bin of the electronics department at the Little Creek Navy Exchange during the summer of 1987. I liked the title, so I splurged the buck-ninety-nine. It was a great decision.

Best Track: "Nowhere Road" currently, but probably really "It's All Up to You"

Lasting Memory: My freshman year dormmate, Barry, preferred to fall asleep while listening to music. Exit Zero, even though it includes more than a few flat-out honky-tonk rockers and the imagery of almost all the lyrics run from grim to black, was a mutally agreeable choice for the last spin of most evenings.

The whole tone of the album is set with the opening lines of the opening track, "Nowhere Road,"

There's a road, in Oklahoma
Straighter than a preacher
Longer than a memory
And it goes, forever onward
Been a good teacher
For a lot of country boys like me

I push that load from here to someday
I'll push as long as I'm alive, but I don't know how long I'll last
'Cause it's just a road, it ain't no highway
I'm blowin' by the double five
I know I'm going way too fast

I been down this road just searching' for the end
It don't go nowhere, it just brings you back again
Leaves you lonely and cold, standin' on the shoulder
But you've come too far to go back home
So you're walkin' on a nowhere road

What always gets me about "Nowhere Road" is that while it's a pure escape fantasy, it's also a grownup's reconciliation with the fact that, as Too Much Joy sang about five years later, "I'd take a trip/ But everywhere I'd go/ My head would come along with me." But the Steve Earle version of this eternal truth is better because it's a hopeful angry more than just a simmering moral ennui. While Earle's protagonist knows he's beaten before he begins, he's still going to try.

Of course, Earle also recognized that metphorical heads never do breach actual walls, no matter how hard they are banged. He knows, that is, that there ain't no place for an "Angry Young Man" who "Ain't Ever Satisfied." Thirty when he recorded the songs collected on Exit 0, Earle wasn't exactly young and he'd appeared to have at least come to terms with a lot of the anger he was describing. Later in his career, his anger turned to politics (which I disagree with him on) and the death penalty (which I do agree with him on).

Two other themes that emeged fully for Earle on Exit 0 were his amazing skill in creating and delivering Texas Tornados-style rockabilly and his willingness to nearly surrender to the support of a strong family and a patient woman. All three of Earle's themes come together amusingly on "The Week of Living Dangerously," which tells the story of a bored husband and father who took a unauthorized vacation and concludes:

Well I woke up in a county jail 'cross the line in Laredo
With a headache and a deputy staring at me through the door
Well he said "Now how you got across that river alive, I don't know
But your wife just made your bail so now you're really dead for sure"

Now my wife, she called my boss and she lied so I got my job back
And the boys down at the plant, they whisper and stare at me
Yea well my wife can find a lot of little jobs to keep me on the right track
Well, but that's a small price to pay for a week of living dangerously

Yeah-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-wee
That's a small price to pay for a week of living dangerously

The song Earle was probably born to write and record (with an assist from Harry Stinson) however, is "It's All Up to You" because nobody can walk entirely in their own shoes and everybody needs that candle in the window:

No matter which way the wind blows
It's always cold when you're alone
Ain't no candle in the window
You've got to find your own way home
Now the rain ain't gonna hurt you
It's come to wash away your blues
It's all up to you

No body said it would be easy
But it don't have to be this hard
If you're lookin' for a reason
Just stand right where you are
Now there ain't no one out to get you
They've got to walk in their own shoes

It's all up to you
It's all up to you
No one else can get you through
Right or wrong, win or lose
It's all up to you

You can stand out on that highway
Look as far as you can see
But when you get to that horizon
There's always someplace else to be
But don't you stop to look behind you
'Cause you've got some travelin' left to do
It's all up to you

Up Next: Steve Earle, Copperhead Road, 1988

P.S. Just because I think it's one of the greatest album titles of all time, here is a picture of the cover for Earle's first of several hits collections, Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator. Enjoy, and don't take that particular bit of Steve's advice.

Maybe This Is What They Mean By ...

... hoist by his own petard. Somebody was hoisting something, know what I'm saying.

"So, baby, how much ta get wit' cha?"

And I'd just like to add, HA HA HA HA HA HA [DEEP BREATH] HA HA HA

Come a Thousand Miles From a Guitar Town

Album: Steve Earle, Guitar Town, 1986

Acquired: When we got to Baton Rouge around the midpoint of our tour of the hometowns of state-chartered bank regulatory board chairmen (they were all men, as I recall), Clair and I visited with a college friend of her's who was on faculty at LSU. That guy, Scott, was kind enough to tape this album for me because we had enthused about how good Steve Earle was.

Best Track: "Goodbye's All We've Got Left," just barely edging out the title track

Lasting Memory: During the couple of months I spent working construction during my, uh, interesting year between undergrad and graduate school, I spent 12 to 14 hours a day working only with proudly self-identified rednecks who for the most part had never traveled outside of southwest Virginia. They liked Steve Earle, too. Music is the great uniter.

And now for the non sequitir.

Guitar Town is Earle's major-label debut. Like a good first album should, it provides glimpses into what the artist will be up to should his or her career progress past that first hard-won artistic milestone (to puree a metaphor). The album opens with the rockabilly anthem "Guitar Town," and then switches immediately into the blue collar suburban weeper "Goodbye's All We've Got Left." Here are the lyrics, which seem a little flat on the screen, but click the link and you'll hear what I mean when I say the song is just devastating:

I could tell it when I woke up this mornin'
'Cause I can smell it when a heartache's comin'
Not that I'm in such a hurry to lose you
I'd call you up but there's nothin' that I can do
Talkin' won't do any good anyway
'Cause goodbye's all we've got left to say

I don't think that it'll get any better
So maybe you could just write me a letter
And I could open it up when I'm stronger
Another ten or twelve years, maybe longer
Guess I just don't feel much like bad news today
Goodbye's all we've got left to say

Don't try to call me 'cause I'm takin' my phone out
'Cause if it rings, I'll know what it's about
And don't you worry 'bout me 'cause I'm alright
Maybe you'll run into me somewhere, some night
And if you do just keep goin' your way
Goodbye's all we've got left to say

There are also class politics songs on Guitar Town, like "Good Ol' Boy (Getting Tough)," and love-so-much-it's-gonna-hurt-somebody-and- I-don't-care-who songs, like "Fearless Heart."

So Earle set his stage, and, as I'll write more about in my next few irregularly scheduled posts, he (rock pun alert!) absolutely strutted and fretted his hours upon it. Until the heorin caught up with him.

Up Next: Steve Earle & the Dukes, Exit 0, 1987

Potraits of Artists as Young Men

Album: Drivin' n' Cryin', Fly Me Courageous, 1990

Acquired: Not sure where, but I absolutely picked this up in my much younger days.

Best Track: "Around the Block Again"

Lasting Memory: I have no strong memories of or for this particular album, but listening through Fly Me Courageous a couple of time jogged loose a long-held and usually tightly tamped down wistfulness for every band I've ever liked's better -- and most specifically younger --days.

I've already used the phrase "younger days" twice because it is a truism of rock 'n' roll that every band falls off precipitously in terms of output and quality after the age of 30 or, at a stretch, 35. The Beatles had broken up by the time they were 30. The Who's best work was produced in the early 1970s, when Townsend was in his late 20s. Even Too Much Joy couldn't keep the magic going after Jay and Tim stopped being all adolescent and shit.

The list of bands that couldn't survive the transition to adulthood is too long and too depressing to reproduce here.

Which is not the same as saying that individual artists do not age well and produce amazing work well into their dotage. Springsteen, the aforementioned Townsend, Dylan, and even Drivin' n' Cryin's leader Kevn Kinney as a solo artist prove that point. But there is something about a band that makes the entity incapable of remaining essential after a certain point.

And if you throw U2 back at me as a counteragrument, I will cyberslap you. U2's career ended at the same time as Side A of Joshua Tree.

What stirred up these negative vibes is that Fly Me Courageous is just fine as a hard rock document of 1990, but it is nowhere near as good as DnC's first three albums, regardless of what the Rolling Stone reviewer wrote at the time. The country interludes are all gone, and the songwriting has taken a turn to the political and for the much worse.

Also, as far as I knew until just now, Fly Me Courageous was DnC's final studio album. Turns out that the band released three later albums, but when even your fans don't know, that's a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to turn into gig flyers.

A clip of DnC performing the song "Fly Me Courageous" on Late Night with David Letterman is doubly heartbreaking for the nostalgia-minded. And a reminder that comedians generally age as well as bands.

I'll console myself with "Around the Block Again" and move on to my next series of posts about an artist who was so good early in his career that it was almost scary but who has had difficulty raising much besides a donut in his second act.

Up Next: Steve Earle, Guitar Town, 1985

The Road Most Taken

Album: Drivin' n' Cryin', Mystery Road, 1989

Acquired: One of probably 120 purchases from the Blacksburg Record Exchange. The storefront is probably now an American Apparel franchise. Change sucks. As I shall argue below.

Best Track: "Honeysuckle Blue"

Lasting Memory: For one of my shows on Virginia Tech's student radio station, WUVT, I played an entire hour of "Hell" songs. Three of the songs I spun back-to-back-to-back were titled "Straight to Hell," including one of the standout tracks from Mystery Road. And before you say it, I'll admit that this anecdote proves that I was once just clever enough to be boring.

The familiar need not be dull, however. Nor should it be dismissed as uniaginative. While I'll readily concede that classic rock stations play more to people's unwillingness or inability to keep with new sounds than to the preservation of truly timeless culutural artifacts, I also have to acknowledge that Tod Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me" needs to be played at least once an hour somewhere. (Yikes! Definitely a pre-MTV success story.)

Hearing what we like to hear makes us like what we hear. Sonic innovation is fine up to a point, but playing close to the known usually sells more downloads. At the same time, there is not-so-fine line between showing one's influences and aping one's betters. I won't link to any of the prime offenders, but I'm sure any of us could name dozens of bands who sound so much like bands we've heard before that we have to wonder why they didn't go all out and become Mini Kiss.

What I'm getting at here is that Drivin' n' Cryin' neither ivented nor reinvented any wheels. DnC's genius and lasting appeal is that they could sound like anybody's favorite honky tonk or anyone's most feveredly imagined stadium concert. They do both styles faithfully, but they also add just enough of their own whatever that is to make it worth your effort to listen to DnC.

A writer for The Onion who is currently embarked on a project very similiar to my own said a lot of what I said here (probably better). The takeaway message is that if you're going to wear your influences on our ears, you better be damn good at what you're repackaging. DnC is that damn good, to quote the immortal Triple H.

Check out "Honeysuckle Blue," which is nothing if not both cliched and completely southern rockin'.

Up Next: Drivin' n' Cryin', Fly Me Courageous, 1990

Note from Management: For anyone kind enough to wonder, I'm feeling much better. Any lameness of this post can't be blamed on the rhinovirus. I miss the excuse to be honest. In that spirit, I'll pass along a rhinovirus you can blame for whatever doesn't come out just right today. Enjoy your acellular whipping boy.